General Booth on Primary Education

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume XI, Issue 3729, 6 February 1891, Page 2

General Booth on Primary Education

| In his now famous book General , Booth combats the assertion that tha English child of to-day has tho t inestimable advantage of education. To this he replies : "No, ho has not. Educated children are not; they are passed through the standards, which | exact a certain acquaintance with ABC and pothooks and figures; but educated they are not in the sense of the development of their latent capacities so aB to make them capable for the discharge of their duties in life. The new generation can read, no doubt. Otherwise, whare would be the sale of " Sixteen string Jack," "Dick Turpin," and the like ? But tako the girls; who cim pretend that the girls whom our schools turn out are half so well educated for the work of life as their grandmothers were at the sarno age J How many of all these mothers of the future know how to bake a loaf or wash their clothes I Except minding the baby—a task that cannot be evaded—what domestic training have they received to qualify them for being in future the mothers of babies themselves ? And even tho schooling, such as it is, at what expense is it often imparted; the Takings of the human cesspool are brought into the scboolbouse and mixed up with your children, Your little ones, who hare never heard a foul word, and who aro not only innocent but ignorant of all the horrors and vice and sin, sit for hours side by side with littlo ones whose parents aro habitually drunk, and play with others whose ideas of merriment are gained from the familiar spectacle of tho uightly debauch by which their mothers earn their family bread. It is good no doubt to learn ABC, but it is not so good that in acquiring these indispensible rudiments your children should also acquire the vocabulary of the lowest of the low. I speak only of what 1 know, and of that which has been brought home to uie as a matter of repeated complaint by my officers, when I say that the obscenity of tho talk of many of the children of some of our publio schools would hardly be outdono ovou in bodom aud Gomorrah,"